Rita Allen Scholars

Since 1976, the Rita Allen Foundation has awarded millions of dollars in grants to early-career biomedical scholars. These grants allow them to establish labs and pursue research directions with above-average risk and promise.

Rita Allen Foundation Scholars have gone on to make transformative contributions to their fields of study, and have won recognition including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the National Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize in Medicine, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Today, Rita Allen Foundation Scholars receive up to $110,000 per year for a maximum of five years.

The Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program funds basic biomedical research in the fields of cancer, immunology and neuroscience. The Foundation also supports an award for scholars in pain research, who are selected in collaboration with the American Pain Society.

Rita Allen Foundation Scholars are distinguished by their bold approaches to basic scientific questions that address problems of global concern, as well as their potential for learning, leadership and collaboration. For application information, see our FAQs.

Project: How do signals from resident bacteria keep the intestines healthy?

Motivated by a desire to advance strategies for environmental protection, Dingding An began her undergraduate education in environmental engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She took many courses in chemistry and physics, but was increasingly drawn to biology. An’s research experience at Duke University helped her make this transition—she chose a laboratory that focused on the remediation of pollution by microbial processes, and discovered she had a keen interest in working with bacteria.

In her doctoral research, An explored how multiple species of bacteria grow, survive and compete in communities called biofilms, which are known for posing problems in food production and medicine. During the course of her Ph.D., she followed her mentor, Matthew Parsek, from Northwestern University to the University of Iowa, and finally to the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. This exposure to diverse biological research environments inspired An to pursue research on host-microbe interactions.

As a postdoctoral fellow in Dennis Kasper’s lab at Harvard Medical School, she began using mouse models to examine microbes that function not as pathogens, but as partners. She studied how bacteria living in the intestine modulate the immune system and protect the host from inflammatory bowel disease. An found that this protection is conferred in part by unique yet abundant bacterial molecules called sphingolipids. Now, An and her team are seeking a fuller understanding of sphingolipids in intestinal health. Their research will address why these bacterial signals seem to be important early in life, and how sphingolipids affect the production of mucus, which forms a critical barrier between bacterial cells and the host’s intestinal cells. “Eventually, I think we could identify specific sphingolipids produced by bacteria and use them as therapeutics to specifically help patients when they have a mucus production problem,” she says.

Kyle Baumbauer

Kyle Baumbauer (Award in Pain Recipient) earned a B.S. in psychology and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Central Florida. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Kent State University, where he studied molecular mechanisms that allow neurons in the spinal cord to mediate learning and adaptation to the environment. This research contributed to an emerging view of the spinal cord not merely as a channel for signals traveling to and from the brain, but as a dynamic group of nerves with important effects on behavior. Baumbauer continued this area of research while a postdoctoral fellow at Texas A&M University, and explored how painful stimulation impacts spinal cord function to understand how the presence of pain affects the recovery of function after spinal cord injury. Baumbauer then did a second fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, where he began examining the impact of injury and inflammation on peripheral sensory neuron function.

In 2014 Baumbauer joined the faculty at the University of Connecticut School of Nursing, where his research focuses on unraveling the relationship between alterations in gene expression and sensory neuron function, and how these processes contribute to chronic pain following spinal cord injury. Through these investigations, Baumbauer and his team aim to make advances that aid in the treatment of pathological pain. In addition to the Rita Allen Foundation Baumbauer’s research is supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. He is also a recipient of a Mary Lawrence Research Development Award from the UConn School of Nursing and has been honored as a Sigma Theta Tau Friend of Nursing.

Richard Daneman

Richard Daneman has been designated the Milton E. Cassel Scholar for the 2017 class of Rita Allen Foundation Scholars. This special award honors the memory of a long-time President of the Rita Allen Foundation who passed away in 2004.

Project: How does the blood–brain barrier influence the activities of neurons in the brain?

Richard Daneman grew up in an academic family. His parents, a cognitive psychologist and a pediatric endocrinologist, sometimes enlisted him and his brother to serve as research subjects. From an early age, Daneman says, he was attracted to the “amazing adventure” of science: “I loved asking a question that had no answer and trying to work out different ways that you could solve a problem.” As an undergraduate, he got involved in projects to develop new laboratory techniques—to measure fine-scale pH changes within cells, and to analyze gene expression patterns in fruit flies.

Daneman conducted graduate work at Stanford University with Ben Barres, a neurobiologist known for research on glial cells, which make up a large proportion of cells in the nervous system but are vastly understudied. The Barres lab was an ideal setting for Daneman to pursue another overlooked aspect of the nervous system: the blood–brain barrier. He led studies to identify molecular signals that give blood vessels in the central nervous system their unique properties—unlike the “leaky” blood vessels in other tissues, they restrict the movement of toxins, pathogens and immune cells.

Daneman continued to focus on the blood–brain barrier during a fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, and is now pursuing multiple questions related to the barrier’s development and its breakdown in conditions of injury or disease. He recently discovered physiological processes within the brain’s blood vessels that could influence the function of neurons. The Rita Allen Foundation award will allow Daneman and his team to examine the role of the blood–brain barrier in brain functioning. “We think of blood vessels as these tubes that run through the brain,” he says. “But the idea that they have these dynamic physiological properties that can fine-tune and manipulate the [neural] circuits—we know nothing about that.”

Arkady Khoutorsky

Arkady Khoutorsky (Award in Pain Recipient) earned a B.Sc. in biology and an M.Sc. in neurobiology, as well as D.V.M. and Ph.D. degrees, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University, Khoutorsky investigated how regulation of protein synthesis controls neuronal plasticity in the brain and in the pain pathway. He joined McGill’s Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain in 2016. In addition to the Rita Allen Foundation, Khoutorsky’s work is supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and by a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant and a Louise and Alan Edwards Foundation Grant in Chronic Pain Research.

Khoutorsky’s lab is examining how neuronal circuits in the spinal cord are remodeled to promote sensitivity to pain. He is interested in the extracellular matrix, a network of proteins that surrounds neurons. In the brain, this matrix appears to restrict the ability of neurons to form the new structures necessary for learning and memory. Enzymes that degrade the matrix are activated in some chronic pain conditions. Khoutorsky and his team are investigating how such degradation impacts spinal cord neurons that normally inhibit pain signals. They aim to determine how changes in the extracellular matrix might enable the neurons to become “hyperexcitable” and inappropriately propagate pain.

Project: How can chronic stress change neural circuits and lead to depression?

Stephan Lammel has a longstanding interest in medicine, and began training as a pharmacist with the intention of taking over his family’s business. During his pharmacy residency, he grew frustrated with the limitations and side effects of currently available medications—particularly for neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. Then he met a researcher, Jochen Roeper, who was studying how dopamine neurons degenerate in Parkinson’s disease.

Lammel was excited by the opportunity to explore the underlying neurobiology of the dopamine system, and to make discoveries that could guide more effective therapeutic approaches. He joined Roeper’s lab as a master’s student, and later pursued a Ph.D. His work helped to reveal diversity in the properties of dopamine-containing neurons. As a postdoctoral scholar in Robert Malenka’s lab at Stanford University, Lammel continued investigating dopamine neurons, including neural circuits involved in reward and motivation.

With support from the Rita Allen Foundation, Lammel and his team will apply new technologies to examine the mechanisms by which chronic stress can lead to depression. Better knowledge of these mechanisms is crucial to treating depression, he says, as today’s outdated therapies are effective for less than half of patients, and have many undesirable side effects. Lammel’s research group will follow changes in neural activity in freely moving animals over time, using methods such as optogenetics and in vivo calcium imaging to visualize changes in activity among specific populations of neurons. “If we understand the circuits in which these neurons are embedded, we can manipulate them in a more specific way and try to reverse some of the pathological changes in these circuits”, he explains. “Ultimately, we hope these manipulations can also reverse some of the symptoms of depression.”

As an undergraduate, Conor Liston became fascinated by the science of learning and memory, and by larger questions of how the brain gives rise to consciousness. “One of the things that attracted me to neuroscience was the potential for discoveries that would transform the way we think about ourselves as people, and also could potentially transform the way we think about diagnosing and treating disorders of the brain,” he says.

Liston’s desire to improve the understanding and treatment of mental illness led him to pursue an M.D.-Ph.D. During his psychiatry residency at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, he also conducted postdoctoral research with Wen-Biao Gan at New York University, investigating how stress hormones affect neural connections critical for learning. This research fueled his interest in new technologies for visualizing and experimentally manipulating activity in the living brain, and led him to a fellowship at Stanford University. There, Liston worked in the laboratory of Karl Deisseroth, known as a pioneer of optogenetics—a technique for controlling and monitoring neurons using specific wavelengths of light. Liston used optogenetics and other new imaging methods to explore the neural circuitry of fear responses and reward-seeking behaviors.

Now, Liston, an assistant professor of neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, treats psychiatric patients in the clinic, and leads a research program on the neuroscience of learning, memory, stress and depression. Support from the Rita Allen Foundation will allow Liston and his team to investigate the basis of working memory—the type of memory that operates when we remember and call a phone number, but forget it a few hours later. Working memory “is both stable and robust enough to not be interfered with by irrelevant information in our environment, but also labile enough to be easily deleted and replaced with new information,” Liston explains. “That’s an interesting paradox: How does our brain register memories that have these two competing qualities?” He plans to examine how different subtypes of neurons interact to achieve this balance—and how it can be disrupted in conditions such as depression.

Kate Meyer

B.S., Biopsychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Michigan
Ph.D., Neuroscience, Northwestern University

Project: How does a modification of RNA influence the brain’s development and activity?

As a child, Kate Meyer had ambitions of becoming a surgeon, and entered college on a premedical track. A course on abnormal psychology fueled her fascination with the brain’s complexity, and she switched her focus to neuroscience. She helped with a research project on the neural basis of taste, which involved “scoring rat behaviors for hours on end, and loving it,” she recalls. “I was super excited to do literally anything” in the laboratory, Meyer adds.

She sought further training in neuroscience as a Ph.D. student in Jill Morris’ lab at Northwestern University, where she investigated the expression pattern of a gene implicated in schizophrenia and assessed its role in the developing brain. During a postdoctoral fellowship with Samie Jaffrey at Weill Cornell Medical College, Meyer delved into the biology of RNA. She led a comprehensive analysis of an RNA modification called m6A—the methylation of adenosine residues, a chemical marker that can influence whether an RNA molecule is translated into protein. Using next-generation sequencing, Meyer and her colleagues showed that the modification is widespread among thousands of genes in mammals, and that its prevalence increases in the brain during development.

In her own laboratory at Duke, Meyer and her team are exploring how the m6A modification affects when and where genes are expressed—with special attention to how this regulation shapes the growth, connections and activities of neurons. Her goal, she says, is “to understand, all the way from the molecular level to the behavioral level, what happens if we manipulate this pathway that controls methylation. What are the consequences for things like learning and memory, or neurological disease?”

About the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars Program

What is the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program? What are its funding priorities?

The Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program funds basic biomedical research in the fields of cancer, immunology and neuroscience. The Foundation also supports an award for scholars in pain research, who are selected in collaboration with the American Pain Society. Learn more about the Rita Allen Foundation Award in Pain here. The Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program has supported more than 150 scientists since 1976. The program embraces innovative research with above-average risk and groundbreaking possibilities. Scholars have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the National Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize in Medicine and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

What size of grants are available to Rita Allen Foundation Scholars?

Scholars can receive up to $110,000 per year for a maximum of five years. Scholars in Pain Research can be granted $50,000 per year for up to three years.

What can the grant funds be used for?

Rita Allen Foundation Scholar grant funds may only be used for direct project expenses, including up to 50 percent of the Scholar’s compensation.

Who is eligible to apply for the Scholars program?

Only invited institutions are eligible to submit a nomination for consideration for the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program. The Rita Allen Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee reviews and recommends eligible institutions. One nominated candidate per eligible institution is accepted per year. The Scientific Advisory Committee reviews and selects finalists from the eligible institutions, interviews them in person, and selects the recipients, who are confirmed by the Rita Allen Foundation Board of Directors.

If an institution is not on the eligible list, how can it be considered for inclusion?

Institutions not currently eligible but interested should write to Elizabeth Good Christopherson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Rita Allen Foundation, 92 Nassau Street, Third Floor, Princeton, New Jersey 08542. The Rita Allen Foundation will notify institutions deemed eligible to nominate. The Scientific Advisory Committee typically reviews the eligibility list in the spring of each year, with invitation letters released in the summer or early fall.

Who is eligible to become a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar?

To be eligible for a Rita Allen Foundation Scholars Award, candidates must be nominated by an invited institution and have completed their training and provided persuasive evidence of distinguished achievement or extraordinary promise in research in one of the relevant fields (cancer, immunology, neuroscience or pain). United States citizenship is not a requirement; however, awardees must be legally employed at a U.S. degree-granting or research institution that is an invited participant in the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars Program. Awards are made to the 501(c)(3) organization; awards are not made to an individual. Scholars must perform research at a non-profit institution in the U.S. during the entire period of Rita Allen Foundation support.

Who should be nominated for the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program?

Institutions should consider the following when considering whom to nominate for the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program:

Candidates should be independent investigators in the early stages of their careers and research.

The caliber of early-stage investigators suggests nominees would be appointed to tenure-track positions at their respective institutions.

It is preferable that candidates be in the first three years of their tenure track. (This is taken into consideration in the rating of applications by the Scientific Advisory Committee.)

A senior postdoc should not be a candidate; wait until s/he is in a tenure-track position, as described.

Associate professors should not be candidates.

Candidates must have received committed startup funds from their respective institutions.

Candidates must have lab space from their institutions.

Other sources of funding may influence selection. Rita Allen Foundation Scholars may not accept a faculty development award of more than $200,000 from another private funding organization (i.e., Beckman, Pew, Searle) for the first year of the RAF award. Rita Allen Scholars may apply for awards from these organizations that would take effect beginning in year two of the RAF award.

Nominating institutions should consider the highly competitive nature of the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program and submit their strongest nominee for consideration. The Rita Allen Foundation requests that eligible institutions share with us a description of the process they follow to nominate candidates.

Further questions regarding the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program should be directed to those responsible for the internal nominating process within a given eligible institution.

What are the key dates and deadlines for the 2018 program?

October 30, 2017 – January 19, 2018

Application period

December 8, 2017

Letter of Inquiry (LOI) deadline

January 19, 2018

Application deadline (11:59 p.m. EST)

February and March 2018

Review period

April 27, 2018

Finalist interviews – New York City

May 2018

Grant awards announced

June 2018

Grant contracts due

June 2018

Press announcement

September 2018 – August 2023

Grant period

August 31, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

Interim reports due

December 1, 2023

Final report due

What is the nomination and application process?

The nomination must be completed by a senior official at the nominating institution and must be completed online through Fluxx, a Web-based grant application system. Nominations should include the following required support materials:

Identification of the candidate and an official letter of nomination;

An assessment of the candidate; and

A description of the procedure used by the institution to identify the nominee.

Institutions are limited to submitting one nomination per review cycle.

Once the nomination is complete and has been approved by the Foundation, candidates are required to complete the grant application in Fluxx and provide application support materials.

What reports are required of Rita Allen Foundation Scholars?

Successful grant recipients are required to provide complete annual narrative and financial reports detailing their expenditure of the grant funds and progress made toward the goal(s) of the grants. Grant reports also must be submitted online through Fluxx.